Morning Agenda: The Next Big Battle for Business Is Immigration

The next potential battle between the Trump administration and business leaders is near, and it’s on immigration.

The White House is weighing whether to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the popular program that suspended deportation of undocumented workers who had arrived in the United States as children. Right now, President Trump is leaning toward ending the program, according to Axios.

Late on Thursday, a big group of top business leaders posted an open letter to Mr. Trump and congressional leaders arguing against the move.

“Dreamers are vital to the future of our companies and our economy. With them, we grow and create jobs,” the leaders wrote. “They are part of why we will continue to have a global competitive advantage.”

Among the hundreds of signatories:

• Warren E. Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway

• Tim Cook, Apple

• Jeff Bezos, Amazon

• Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

• Sundar Pichai, Google

• Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective

• Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, Microsoft

• Mary T. Barra, General Motors

The big questions: Will Mr. Trump bend to pressure from the business community? If not, what might those C.E.O.s do next? Two prominent advisory councils already disbanded after the president’s controversial remarks on the violence in Charlottesville, Va.

The Consumer Financial Watchdog Isn’t Dead Yet

Many federal agencies have begun relaxing regulations in the Trump era. But the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not one of them.

The agency, set up under Barack Obama, has continued to crack down on debt collectors, while pushing out a new rule on arbitration and pursuing enforcement actions against payday lenders.

The current White House may not be a fan of the regulator. But The New York Times reports that while the Trump administration weighed openly attacking the C.F.P.B., polling data from politically important states dissuaded it from such a move.

“It’s an agency about protecting the little guy, and that is tough to oppose,” said Dean Clancy, a policy analyst tracking the bureau.

But opponents haven’t given up on defanging it. The C.F.P.B. has gotten the cold shoulder from important regulatory allies like the Justice Department and the Treasury Department. And the White House could pick a business-friendly replacement for the regulator’s director, Richard Cordray, who might resign to enter the Democratic primary for governor of Ohio.

More From Washington:

• Mr. Trump could look to the District of Columbia for inspiration on tax reform, according to The Times’s Jim Stewart.

• Harriet Tubman may not replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill after all. The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, declined to endorse the plan to redesign the bill and include a rendering of the black abolitionist.

Scale of Wells Fargo’s Scandal Grows

The scale of sham accounts at Wells Fargo is higher than initially reported — 1.4 million higher.

In the year since the scandal became public, Wells Fargo’s investigation into the matter has now put the number of unauthorized accounts at 3.5 million, 70 percent higher than initial estimates. That has prompted concerns about how slow the bank has been in coming clean.

The infractions are mounting:

• Unrequested auto insurance that affected 800,000 people

• Unauthorized changes to mortgage repayment terms in bankruptcy

• Improper withholding of refunds to car loan customers

• Some 528,000 cases where customers were signed up to online bill payment which once carried fees

Related reading: Consumer groups and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, have called for more congressional hearings. But it is unclear whether Republicans will convene them.

Gretchen Morgenson points out that Wells Fargo’s lobbyists have been hard at work. The firm spent $6.5 million on lobbying efforts in the 18 months ended June 30, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And the bank’s independent directors separately spent $450,000 on lobbying from Oct. 1 to June 30.

Where the Kushners Looked for Real-Estate Cash

While Jared Kushner has plenty of tough problems assigned to him at the White House, his family’s real estate business is weighed down by its own millstone: 666 Fifth Avenue, the office building in Midtown Manhattan that the Kushner Companies bought in 2006 for $1.8 billion.

Bloomberg has a deep dive into how Mr. Kushner and his company came to buy 666 Fifth Avenue. More interesting is where Kushner Companies has looked for financing partners to help shore up the debt-laden building:

• The Steinmetz family, an Israeli family whose fortune lies in diamonds

• A Qatari sheikh, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who agreed to invest $500 million if other investors came on board, but none did

• Fawaz Alhokair, a billionaire from Saudi Arabia

From Europe:

• Bernard Arnault of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton

The Kushner Companies told Bloomberg that 666 Fifth Avenue is now only “one small piece” of its business portfolio. But the article notes that many of the company’s current holdings are also mortgaged, or shared with partners.

A $5 Billion Race for Nets

Hellman & Friedman is leading the race to buy the Scandinavian payments processor Nets in a deal expected to value it at more than $5 billion, The Financial Times reports.

The transaction would be the largest European leveraged buyout in four years. It also comes after a flurry of deal making in the payments processing industry as companies look to grab a part of digital spending infrastructure:

• Vantiv agreed to buy Worldpay in August, after striking deals to buy Moneris Solutions Corporation and Paymetric over the last year.

• Blackstone and CVC Capital Partners teamed up to bid for Paysafe this year, which had snapped up Merchants Choice Payments Solutions.

• Visa agreed in 2015 to buy its European unit from a group of banks and payment providers for about $24 billion.